Attending a standard concert is one thing; experiencing a performance where the acoustic music is so resonant that the sound waves physically vibrate through the body is another — and a local ensemble offers just that.
The Florence-based group Mountain River Taiko will perform a concert called “Tsudoi (集い),” which translates into English as “a gathering among friends,” on Sunday, May 31 at 4 p.m. at Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence. The performance will feature an array of guest artists, including nihon-buyō dancer Michiko Kurata; taiko performer Stuart Paton, the founder and artistic director of Burlington Taiko; and koto player Anne Prescott, the director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies.
Taiko is a form of traditional Japanese drumming renowned for its loud, powerful sound. While contemporary ensemble taiko became popularized across Japan in the 1960s, Mountain River Taiko is a much younger organization — founding director Olga Ehrlich created the group in Williamsburg in 2011. Today, the ensemble coordinates public and private performances alongside educational workshops to teach traditional taiko drumming skills and associated cultural customs.
Mountain River Taiko is one of the resident artist companies at Bombyx, and the ensemble rehearses on Tuesday nights in the building’s Peacock Room, where the thunderous sound of the drums reverberates through the wooden floors. Group members are encouraged to wear earplugs at rehearsals. Noise-sensitive guests attending Tsudoi must provide their own ear protection.
The group has 17 members between the ages of 18 and 66, and 13 of them gathered for rehearsal on the night of Tuesday, May 19. They began by forming a circle, stretching and vocalizing rhythms in unison as they mimed drumming movements to ensure everyone remembered the complex beat of an upcoming song: “Dohm, dohm, dohm, dohm, dohm, doko-doko-doko-do-kah! Da-dum, dum!” A collection of stage diagrams was taped on a wall nearby, showing how the group members and their instruments — stretching from the giant o-daiko standing in the back to the hyoshigi, or handheld wooden clappers — would be precisely arranged for each composition.
Kokoro Bensonoff, one of the group’s two co-artistic directors, grew up in Japan and moved to the U.S. in 2004. A few years ago, she found herself deeply missing the traditional taiko music she had grown up around, even though she had never played the drums herself. One day, while driving through Hadley, Bensonoff turned on the car radio and suddenly “heard this taiko drum ‘boom’ sound, and I just cried,” she recalled. “It spoke to me viscerally. And since then, I was like, ‘How can I do this? I want to do taiko.’”
Not long after that, Bensonoff’s husband happened to find a flyer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst advertising an eight-week taiko workshop, and she signed up immediately. She officially joined Mountain River Taiko right after she completed the course. Today, the group serves as a significant anchor in her life and a cherished tie to her heritage.
“It feeds me [on] such a deep level … and it’s just so fun,” she said. “It’s so fun. Every single practice is so fun.”
Andrea Green, the group’s executive director, also grew up around taiko as a child in Hawaii, where the local culture is heavily influenced by Japanese immigrants. A few years ago, she saw a video of her nieces in Hawaii playing taiko and thought, “That looks so fun. I wonder if there’s a place around here that does it.” She found Mountain River Taiko through a performance at First Night Northampton and asked how she could get involved.
Green said that one of the things she appreciates most about taiko is the community: “I’ve never met a taiko player who I don’t like.”
“I think there’s something that makes a taiko player a taiko player — [it] has to do with humility, respect for each other and an overall willingness to learn. That’s what we do here. Because we’re a community group, we work together. We give each other a lot of feedback because we have to,” she said.
The last piece the group played that night was a call-and-response: performers on one side of the stage would play a beat — BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM — then performers on the other side would repeat it.
“People get jazzed because you can feel the drums when they’re playing,” Green said. “It’s not just watching and hearing, but you can actually feel it in your body, and I think it pumps you up.”
By the end, as Bensonoff kept time on the shime-daiko, both sides had synchronized into the same rhythm — BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM, BA-BOOM-BOOM. It sounded like a thunderstorm, but it was something better — it was the product of immense rehearsal, incredible stamina and a deep love for Japanese culture.
Admission to the concert is free, but guests are encouraged to register at bombyx.live. For more information about Mountain River Taiko, visit mountainrivertaiko.com.
